Ptak Science Books

Keeping 1935's Secretaries Unmarried

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1261    Part of the History of Women series

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It good to remind ourselves of how we got so comfortable here in the present by looking at the uncomfortable parts of the past, and remembering those people who made the sacrifices necessary to ameliorate those differences.  Sometimes that spiked memory looks small but isn’t so, sometimes it’s a tidy and explosive nugget nestled in decent surroundings, but explosive nonetheless.

That’s what I found looking through this very considered, nicely designed and well written vocational pamphlet for the Katherine Gibbs School (of New York, Providence, Boston and Bermuda).  The Private Secretary, Qualifications and Requirements (1935) laid out all of the necessaries for the better-placed secretary, many of which no doubt were the teaching specialty of Ms. Gibb.

The pamphlet described plenty of excellent qualities for anyone seeking any sort of employment–then or now–all of which could be supplied to any student of Ms. Gibb–I kept climbing over them looking and waiting for the now-severely-dated practices to appear.  Mainly they didn’t appear in whole so much as in bits and pieces, sprinkled well throughout the work. But on the last page came this nugget, which I think pulls all of the disparate pieces together in a general statement about the position of women in the workplace in 1935:



And there you have it. A key to understanding the status of women in 1935.  You'll notice that the "company policy" is generic, which means that the practice was wide-spread.  And remember too that this is just for marriage--not pregnancy, which is implied in the company's dissociation with the married secretary, cutting their ties now before any pregnancy begins.

[This pamphlet is available for purchase from our blog bookstore.]

VIDEO: Smashnose Grindkiss of Lady Archaeology of 1950's B-Movie Posters.

I posted something yesterday on this, but made a video of the whole thing (plus extras) this morning, with some decent music.

 

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

The Lady Archaeology of Smashnose B-Film Movie Posters.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1254

There was a certain something going on in the 1950's with nova-express B-film ladys-in-trouble/bad girl/smashnose kissing  movies that were made for $5,600 in three days with two days of quality control.  The posters made for these beauties were a thing unto themselves, a self-contained and self-limiting genre, a found case of bizarro design and muted inelegancies.

The posters look like their movie names:  Juvenile Jungle, Betrayed Women, Girls in Prison, One Girl's Confession, Dragstrip Girl, Girls on the Loose, Pick Up, Girls in the Night, Live Fast Die Young, Alimony Running Wild, Hot Rod Rumble, Running Wild, Blonde Bait, Captive Women, The Party Crashers and of course Lost, Lonely and Vicious.

Generally I think that folks see the big design and the colors, but lurking behind all of that are usually image-bits that sorta tell a part of the story of the film, but in a stubby, grubby way.  So I decided to do a little archaeological dig into some of these and give those small images some life through magnification.  Sometimes they're surprising and look good big; sometimes they're just badly design and goofy, and would look better smaller, very much smaller---dot-small.  Here's a few examples (I'll show the detail first and then the larger, full image of the poster after):

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Detail

Full poster:

Full poster:

Detail

 

Full poster:

Detail:

Detail:

Full poster:

Detail

 
Detail

detail

Full poster, 1955.

 

Detail:

detail:

 

 

Detail:

detail:

Full poster, Betrayed Women, 1955:

Detail:

|Full poster, Juvenile Jungle, 1958

detail:

Full poster, Captive Women, 1952

 
Full poster,Captive Women, 1952

Detail:

Full poster, Lost, Lonely and Vicious, 1952:

Detail:

Detail, Party Crashers, 1958

 

How Many Dreams Have Humans Dreamt? A Lost Dream from 1762.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1251

The Dreamworks of Human Beings over the last 10,000 years have generally not directly survived, unless they were painted on a cave wall, or saved in the spoken tradition, or recorded in a painting, or written down as literature or poetry or religious tracts (as "visions", say).  The work of human brains while asleep is almost entirely lost, especially so before the year 1900, when disposable writing instruments and more easily found paper supply came into being, making it possible to record personal ephemera like dreams and wishes and posie notions. A vast amount of subconscious thinking and overall brain activity is just simply disappeared.

An off-the-cuff guessitmate is that humans have had the capacity to have dreamt 10x10^25 dreams over the last 10,000 years, and before the year 1900 I'd say that .00000000000000001% of them have ever been recorded, have ever found a stable platform to be carried into the future. (It would be easier to pass a monumental camel through the eye of a nanoneedle than it would be to try and reconstruct these dreams, paraphrasing Luke 10:25 as long as we'ev got 1^25 in our sights.)  Even though the human brain spent probably 20% of its time over human history dreaming, there is almost nothing to show for it. 

Here's a surviving dream, a manuscript--or rather a copy of a manuscript--called "A Remarkable Dream--Dreamed by B.C. in England 10 Month 30 1762".  It is four pages of pretty densely packed recollection of a long dream, 4,000 words strong, recalling fire and brimstone visions of the Bad Land, some sights of Heaven, remarkable animals, strange happenings, and general Ecclesiastical undertones.  One unusual thing--there is mention of color, which seems not to be common in dreams in general.

I've found several examples of this dream/story, copied by different hands over the decades--it seems to have been a somewhat popular account, transcribed by (young?) folks as a part of a lesson, perhaps with a Quaker-related bearing (?). 

This manuscript copy (available for purchase from our blog bookstore) was made in the very early 19th century, 1800-1820 or thereabouts, and my guess is that it is American. 

I've scanned all four pages for the eager reader.  It is a little bit of a tough go, but your eyes get used to the writing style after a while.

Mrs. Kennedy's T.V. Show, 1960

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1239

"Much of what we used for Caroline will serve for the new baby, too. Any new things I buy, I choose in neutral shades, being completely impartial as to whether it's a boy or a girl"--.Jacqueline Kennedy, on how she will dress her coming baby, November, 1960.

The Kennedy presidential campaign of 1960 was certainly of a different era--it had its fair share of good and bad, but what it lacked was the noble predator of massive television coverage.  There's was a minor major attempt at utilizing the new medium, and certainly from where we sit today, the effort looks quaint, naive.

  What we have here is Jackie Kennedy's copy of a script entitled "Talk About Tennessee", (dated  Oct 17, 1960) for a 15-minute television endorsement for John Kennedy's presidential campaign. Its a six-page insight into the workings of the campaign,  an x-ray of fifteen minutes of Jackie Kennedy talking with the leading ladies--featuring Mrs. Kennedy, Mrs. Albert Gore, Mrs. Estes Kefauver, and Mrs. Buford Ellington.of Tennessee--in a hearts-and-minds attempt for women's votes. In fact, the scripts are titled "Mrs. Kennedy TV Show" in the hand of her acting social/press secretary, Gladys Uhl--it is in fact a full-fledged commercial spot, a long advertisement, though called something a little higher-minded than that.  But an ad is an ad, and this is definitely an ad. We see the enterprise from the director's eye, who arranges the motion of the camera, the arrangement and style of music, and suggestions for conversation. [This document is available for purchase from our blog bookstore.]

In the current era of micro-micro-management of micro-details, created nuance, utterly lost spontaneity, carefully crafted breathing and absolutely scripted off-the-cuff remarks, this effort seems extraordinary to the room that it left for instantaneous discussion.

This material is from the estate of Mrs. Gladys Uhl, who served as the press liason and secretary for Mrs. Kennedy for a short time at the end of the election during the fall of 1960, though she did not follow Mrs. Kennedy into the White House. (Mrs. Uhl was the wife of Alexander Uhl, a very prominent and superb reporter who covered the Spanish Civil War in the front lines for several years, and who reported first hand on action during WWII, and covered many early civil rights movements for the Associated Press, the far-ish Left PM Newspaper, and many others. Her second husband, David Katcher, was the founding editor of Science Today magazine and who served a number of administrations in various high-level capacities.)

The document, purple ink printed on yellow paper, and was evidently produced by Guild, Bascom and Bonfigli, Inc., and dated 17 October 1960, and is inscribed (in Uhl's hand) "Mrs. Kennedy" in ink at top center of the document.  It details the look, feel and sound of the "TV show", and also has suggestion about the content of the conversation. There are outlines for conversation *only* as there appears not to have been a definite script for each of the women. The entirety of the show does seem to be here, though, directing how the show should look to the viewer. The document is essentially divided into two sections, left and right, one side describing the video segment and the other describing the audio. A sample as follows:

VIDEO (pg 1). "Open sequence on N street" (home of the Kennedys during this period was 3307 N in Georgetown, DC)

AUDIO (pg 1). Music: "something that establishes homey, friendly mood".

VIDEO (pg 1): "camera pans with women as they walk up to door, opened by Mrs. Kennedy".  [The conversation is mostly directed towards Jackie and the campaign.]

AUDIO (pg 2): "guests relate own experiences as wives of political figures, then ask Mrs. K if it isn't a worry to see her husband go 17 or 18 hours, 1700 miles a day". 

AUDIO (pg 2): "Other possible questions: how do the Kennedys keep in touch during campaign (any interesting or unusual notes or phone messages)?".  Other questions put to Jackie: --what does Senator Kennedy do on his day off? --does he have a favorite meal? --how does Mrs K spend most of her time? --how does Caroline adjust to the activity around her? --has Mrs. K had time to fix up nursery, gather baby clothes? --where does she do her shopping? Then there is this nugget (on page 4) about a possible response for Mrs. Kennedy on her impending childbirth: "Much of what we used for Caroline will serve for the new baby, too. Any new things I buy, I choose in neutral shades, being completely impartial as to whether it's a boy or a girl".

VIDEO (pg 5): "suggested to close program: if there is a family picture, or a picture of Senator Kennedy in the room, someone might draw attention to what a good picture it is. Mrs. K could either bring it in closer or rise and walk over to it. Women would then continue in conversation, silent footage, while the announcer concludes the show, voice over."

VIDEO (pg 6): "Drop super, camera cuts to picture of Sen. Kennedy, if possible within the Kennedy household". VIDEO (pg 6.) "Super: Vote Kennedy-Johnson the Democratic Ticket. Ending."

 

 

Kennedy TV SHow, pg 2

Kennedy TV SHow page 3

Kennedy TV SHow 4

Kennedy TV SHow 5

 

Inauguration Gowns, "Buying American", & Jackie Kennedy: the Kennedy Inauguration of 1961.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1229

[JFK Election/Inauguration rarities may be purchased through our blog bookstore.]

Some years ago I purchased a small archive of documents relating to the public appearances of Jacqueline Kennedy, wife of President John Kennedy.  The material is all pre-inaugural, almost all 1960, and  loaded with interesting unpublished nuggets.  One such bit is this telegram sent by the Kennedy camp to Mrs. Kennedy's first (?) social/press secretary (who did not follow the Kennedys to the white House), Gladys Uhl, the content of which was to be reorganized and matured by Mrs. Uhl  for public distribution.  The subject here was Mrs. Kennedy's coming fashion sense, in general, and of her inaugural gown, in particular.

And what is interesting here is that "when Jacqueline Kennedy moves into the White House she will wear only American clothes and she is looking forward to it".  A fine sentiment; a bolder one too for today if Mrs. Obama decides to follow suit.  It will be much more difficult though for that to happen in 2009 than it would have been in 1961:  this is an age when even some of the most classic "\American" brands of clothing have been moved offshore, made for the USA in China (or Indonesia, or Pakistan, or Vietnam, or wherever the work can be delivered cheaper.  Mrs. Obama has said something about wearing simple clothing, as from a store (chain) like J. Crew--it would be nicer if she were to decide to go with another New York-based clothing store whose goods weren't made in China, though.  I could cozy up to that.  I could also cozy up to the "American Owned" supermarket that I bounce into every other day if that had more American-made products.  I can understand off season veggies and such, but does good-old Motts Apple Juice really need to be made from apple concentrate imported from China (for crying out loud?)?  I remember on 9/13/01 that the Giant Foods supermarket in my neighborhood in Cleveland Park, D.C., started selling American flags--all made in China.  This was just so entirely wrong that a protest was waged, the flags were removed, and then replaced days later with flags made in the USA.  But it is difficult to find American-made clothing in stores--even a so-called "iconic" Appalachian "general store" and landmark in Asheville, a store that wraps itself in folkiness and homespun regional taste, has, I would say, less than 5% American-made goods. 

 

But I digress. I really just wanted to talk about Jackie Kennedy and her inaugural gown and her interest in 'buying American".  In another piece from this modest archive, Jackie sends back her response to Mrs. Uhl's questions, and one in particular about color.  Seems as though Lyndon Johnson's wife, Lady Bird, was going to go shopping at Nieman Marcus for her inaugural gown and wanted to know what color Mrs. Kennedy was going to wear so that she could avoid buying that same color.  Jackie responds at the bottom:  "My Inaug gown will be White--so I'm sure that anything Mrs. Johnson picks will go with it".  

There are other interesting items in this collection that I'll get to soon--several of which are Mrs. Kennedy's copies of some scripts for television commercials for her husbands campaign.  They're actually pretty interesting, and a nice insight into the packing of the President in 1960. 

 

 

 

Determining the Particular and Peculiar for Ladies, 1941

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1211

I must admit that I like the first of these two “lady tests” (separate publications from The Ladies Home Journal), cautionary tales as they are, like being able to select your own villainous wardrobe for a creepy (or loud or not) 1940's version of a Brother’s Grimm fairy tale--instructive, occasionally delightful, often wincing.  It seems that the dividing line between being particular and being peculiar displays its fair share of the miracle of capilary action. 

 

For example,  in Tables for Ladies (1936), the failing grades (minuses) actually look mostly like, well, problematic personality quirks.  I get the “too made up”, “late all the time” and “gold digger” parts–also the character who has a forced laugh, agrees all the time, and is endlessly flattering while putting on makeup and pulling up stockings and monopolizes the conversation (simultaneously?)–and then wants to “go steady” right away while complaining about her (and his) former dates, does not make for an interesting time out. [Both Tables for Ladies and How Ya Doin' are available for purchase at our blog bookstore.]


I’m not sure what “too darned good to be human” and “occasionally have an idea”  mean, nor the failing grade for having too much stuff in your pocket.  A lot of the other stuff looks okay to me: intelligent, honest, friendly, genuine, good natured–basic things that translate just fine into 2010.  But then there are those servile, squinty-eyed parts that just give you a coppery feeling in your mouth for how restrictive they are.

Of course there’s stuff there indicative of the time, just like the awful racism that creeps into Babar or Bugs Bunny from th 1940's, or the rank use of racial epithets that populate some regional maps of the south (I can easily attest to the very broad use of the n-word in more than a dozen places in a large 1932 map of my own Buncombe County, all gone today), or the portrayal of subservient women in 1950's common culture–but for the most part, the overall reach of this little pamphlet seems not-terrible.

The second little test, How Ya Doin’ (1941), verges more on the need for the mass produced Stepford woman, only this one comes from an earlier period, the mother of Stepford.  Some number of the questions seem less significant but more important, many feeling annoying and trite--many of the graded areas are so unexpected (here in 2010) but were in 1941 thought of as being socially important and, well, marketable. 

It was important to say "yes" to the questions "do you scrub your back conscientiously?", "do you walk as if you had a vase on your head?", "does your make up blend with your dress color?", "are your stocking seams always straight?", "can you talk about three sports that boys like?", "do you breathe way down in your diaphragm?", "does anything ever happen to you?", "can you play three sports?", "do you know all the songs the crowd likes?", "is it your responsibility to be entertaining?", and so on.

Not all of the questions feel so sharp and stinging--there are many good qualities (or good qualities from the 2010 mind) that are listed here as well--not to abandon your friends, believing in yourself, inspecting and supporting your opinions, knowing how to decline graciously, feeling good about where you live, being kind, expressing concern, and the like. 

The quizzes are not without quality.

In the same vein you might also enjoy these earlier posts in this blog

What Goes into Making Human Robot Girls 

First Thing to Do is to Find Some Men:  How to Get a Boy-Date, 1941

How to Look Smart, or Pretty, but Not Both

 Maintaining Women as a Subclass: Major Reinforcements from Minor Non-sequitors

Missing Pieces of Women: Pope Joan and the Proper Girl of the Ladies Home Journal

How FDR Made Women (1) Nervous and thus (2) Older. An Appeal to Vote Republican, 1936

The Coming Sex War of 1919

 

 

 

New "Peacetime" Housing, 1945: Bookshelf Needs and Sex Beds.

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1203

Let's Plan a  "Peacetime" Home was published in 1945 by a home gas heaing company to try to answer and capitalize on a severe housing shortage being accentuated by returning WWII vets--I'm not sure why "Peacetime" is placed in quotation marks in the cover copy; perhaps it was just sloppy editing.  But the planning was real, and the ideas were sort of fresh for the time, including a number of new and innovative ideas regarding heating/leat retention and cooling services.  It is a slick, bright, shining publication filled with simple luxuries for the middle class--roomy kitchens, playrooms in the basement, extra bathrooms, storage for baby carriages in the garage, and other pieces of happiness that were still relatively new to the Depression-recovering working folks of the United States.

[This item may be purchased at our blog bookstore.]

I can see a lot of interest in the archaeology of comfort in the many plans and pictures in this brochure, but that's not why I'm presenting it here today.  There's more than a heavy helping of bulbous Bauhaus design, and lots of small rooms surrounding large big main rooms with enormous windows.  But the thing that seems to bookend all of this development are women-in-aprons.  There are men sitting and leaning around plans, smoking pipes, sleeves rolled up, and looking very earnest; at their elbow or across the table is the woman, usually in an apron, looking on in appreciation.

The secondary basis for this Peacetime Home onslaught is a McCall's magazine contest in which "50,000 women" responded to a what-they-hate-most about their house(s).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an interesting check list for house planning, and as a bookseller, I was very pleased to notice that one of the lines for calculating your family's needs in a new house was for books. Not onl;y was it a call for determining the number of shelf feet of books that the family has now, but also the nbeed for future book shelf feet (!)  Not only that, but there was a special consideration large volumes and their sizes; that, and the distribution of books in the house, and how much shelving is needed per room.  I've never seen anything like that in the many brochures and pamphlets like this that are in the architecture collection here, and it is only too-happy a thing to see. 

 

And then I cam across this curious part of the check list, asking about furniture and bedroom needs, and then getting down to the real brass tacks of the sleeping or not-sleeping issue--the type of bed wanted.  The questionnaire asks describes with checkboxes the types of beds available:  twin, double, nursery, number and sex.  I have no dobut that what was being asked for was the sex of the person going to use the bed--I'm not sure why that is necessary--and not whether they were interested in outfitting their houses with "sex beds".  But you never know. 

Women in World War I--Rare Photographs, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1190

[All of the images below are available for purchase; see our blog bookstore for details.]

This is another in a series of posts on images from my News Service Photographs of WWI collection.  All thousand or so of them were made in the last half of 1918 (save for a very few made in 1919) , in the last months of the grueling conflict, and were intended to be used by newspaper and magazines to illustrate stories about the war. An editor would send off a request to one of these agencies for, say, a photograph of marching American nurses, and the agency would send one back (for a fee) along with a caption.   There's really no way for me to determine if these photos were ever published, and there is never an attribution for the photographer. 

Most of the images have an accompanying descriptive text--this was to be used by whomever published the photograph, along with the attribution for the source of the photo. 

In almost every case I supplied a detail of the image, hopefully of something that you'd want to see a detail of. 

ORIGINAL Photograph, 1918.  8x6 inches.  Very good condition.  $150

 

 

 

Women in World War I--Vermeer of the Tars, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books

[This original, vintage image maybe purchased from our blog bookstore, here.]

In England, women were welcomed to the (paid) workforce during the years of the First World War (1914-1918)—their employment in traditionally male positions enabled those they replaced to go out to the front and die for their country.  Thus the women seen here in the News Photo Service Agency photograph (taken in 1918), working at spraying tar in the streets of London, were appreciated, and tolerated.  For women in England the War blasted away the contrivances of formally scheduled employment:  something like 12% of fall women in England were working as servants and house cleaners.   Come the War, women were offered jobs of revolutionary stature in a wide range and variety of work.  The Civil Service employment for women went from 33,000 in 1911 to 102,000 in 1921, and trade union membership rose 160% (357,000 in 1914 to 1,000,000 in 1918 (with men showing a 44% increase at the same time); for the most part, though, employers took advantage of the situation, and the women still generally earned less than half of the salary as comparable male workers did (or the men they replaced). 

When the end of the War came, so did the appreciation for the women replacement workers—there was bitter feelings in the post-war period because of the weak British economy and a scarcity of jobs.  So the women who took the jobs of men to help the country’s war effort and free up hundreds of thousands of men for war service became an atavistic action, “taking” the jobs of men who had gone out to fight for their country. This of course cost many women their jobs, but the damage had already been deeply done to the pre-1914 British world of the sexual politics of business-being-done, though it would take World War II to really ingrain the appearance of women in the workforce into the national psyche.

I've liked this photo for a long time, seeing things differently in it over the years.  It struck me just yesterday that the woman in foreground-right--whose close-up reminds me too of a Madonna, a Mona Lisa of the Tars--looks like a Vermeer character from 400 years ago.  Or at least the position of her body does.

 

Equal Rights for Women--NOT a Good Idea. Redefining "Equality", 1863

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post  1158

"Can a woman be said to have a right to life, if all means of self-protection are denied her….Can she be said to have a right to liberty, when another citizen may have the legal custody of her person ….Can any citizen be said to have the right to the pursuit of happiness, whose inalienable rights are denied; who is disenfranchised from all the privileges of citizenship…?" --Elizabeth Cady Stanton, speaking to the Tenth National Woman's Rights Convention, The Cooper Union, New York, N.Y., May 10 and 11, 1860

A Good Woman is "not an equal of man" or so we are told in this peon to the status quo of 1863.  This  semi-sugary attack upon the "Womans Rights Conventions" found the appeal of equal rights to be almost mostly unappealing--no

t that women should not have "rights", just not "equal" rights.  Jut rights enough--some of which for 1863, as it turns out, were pretty liberal. [The song was probably addressed in general to the series of ten conventions for women's rights that had been held in this country beginning with the first--at Seneca Falls, New York--in 1848. Between then and 1860 there were ten conventions, plus one in 1863 that was called the First Woman's National Loyal League Convention.] 

The song--Woman's Rights, a "Right" Good Ballad, Right of Illustrating Woman's Rights, Rightly Written for the Womans Rights Convention... --and published in Boston in 1863 was written by composer Kate Horn (emphatically self-stating to be "NOT of the woman's rights convention").  She was annoyed with the prospect of overall equality impinging upon traditional womanhood, or at least the current tradition of the feminine, and convinced the publisher Geo. P. Reed to publish her complaint in song. 

She had many supporters, evidently--the equal rights part not really coming partially true, until, well, not even now.  I guess that this is certainly a debate platform, and I could probably argue a good but wrong response from the republican point of view, but I won't--differences in pay scales, access to corporate power, under- and mis-representation in government and so on is not evidently enough of a scare to entice the necessary number of state to endorse the ERA.   In any event, women didn't get a big push towards equal rights until they got the vote in the USA  in 1920 (the legislation which became the 19th Amendment was introduced in 1878; a majority of women didn't exercise that right until, I think, after WWII), and really didn't enjoy much power until the 1960's.  

As it turns out, Ms. Horn was lyrically resolved to demand some equality--but definitely not the brand of people like Elizabeth Cady Stanton.  The greatest surprise from Horn (at least to me) makes the demand for equal pay for equal work, though women should not be allowed to operate machinery and such.  There are a number of calls to decency and modesty which sound like basic ethics, but they're also peppered with subservient overtone rejoinders.  Its hard for her to recover from the call to household "pretty trouble(s) brave", but there are elements of forward thinking in the song.  Horn doesn't absolutely  reject the ideas of "equality" of the rights conventions, but by taking her stance against universal equality she makes her's less so and those of Stanton more.

1947 Anatomy of Womanly Desire–Aprons, Plastics and Meat

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1152  {Part of the History of Women series.]

Looking at just one week’s worth of advertising directed at women in America’s most popular magazine.

One of the great custodians of American popular desire in the 1940's and 1950's was Life magazine, a picture-heavy chronicle of social history and needs and dreams.  I enjoyed the issue of Life for 12 May 1947 because it had an article on the history of skirt lengths (something I wrote about earlier in this blog here), and looking at it a second time I realized that I had entirely missed the ad content that drove the magazine.  The poetry of expectation flavored by the ads directed at women were rive ting to me here in 2010, partially because of their narrow aim, and partially for the simple and simplistic urges that were addressed.


The basic messages were lace, timid street crossing, plastic conveniences, bendy girdles, smart shoes, refrigerator hope chests, instant coffee, machine made clothes by Singer, DuPont combs, artificial fabrics and diamond-centered bedroom window covers by Textron, “shoes to catch his eyes”,  various flavor secrets, baby insomnia aids (“to help your husband sleep”),  dreams of meat, and some other vaguely painful things.

The ad that first caught my attention was the life cycle of woman, seen above, picturing the grown woman in a petroleum-product apron  gleaming as she worked  her way through her Firestone-provided kitchen, emerging from babyhood to childhood to womanly-aprony-adulthood. 

And an impossible position for girdle wears to participate in the wearer’s girdle’s allowances, complete with fluttery Disney-esque birds:

The clustered desire over the another woman’s success in snagging a man’s interest because she could sew:


And just one of three ads exalting various refrigerators, though this one had a newly-minted bride inspecting a model that for all the world could’ve been her hope chest, though this version was filled with food and meat (and a whole hell of a lot of potatoes) and introduced by a version of herself in the next chunky-shoed decade:


There were ads for percale sheets, though the segment has a rather odd, vaguely proto-sensual feel to the thing (hardly I think what was intended in 1947).  It plays out a little better when the ad is rearranged in filmstrip style, reading top-to-bottom, rather than side to side:

 

 

Hm.

Not all of the womanly attention of the magazine was focused on girdles and bras and wedding meat--there was an article on Dorothy Shaver, the President of Lord & Taylor, America's "No. 1 Career Woman".  She made $110,000 a year  and was widely successful, but still  "carried a lace handkerchief and cross(ed) streets timidly", and lived with her younger sister--in an earlier time Life tells us that Ms. Shaver would simply be called a "spinster", "but now she is called a career woman".  There was no change in the description or definition of a "spinster" or a "career woman"--they just changed the name, the result being the same, even in describing the first American woman to ever lead a multi-million-dollar international business.  (This in spite of the fact that there were plenty of working women at the time who were married and had families, no to mention the fact that we had just finished a war during which a  near-majority of women were in the workplace.  None of that seems to have come into play here in 1947, when those same war-working women were summarily replaced and sent packing, and the careerist was defined for one and all to be a spinster.)

I am sure that I will be called to task one day i n the not-too-distant future by my daughters, asking what it  was, exactly, that people were thinking in the year 2000 in regards to women–so strange to them in their version of looking back on their equivalent of my 1947 Life magazine, a version in which I actually lived.

In any event, these ads weren't necessarily what women wanted, of course--they were what advertisers wanted women to want. 

Women--Muzzle Her, Mask Her and Turn Her into a Cigarette. 1953 Ads

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1149

Three ads disappearing women-- first with a muzzle, then with a full head mask, and then there's nothing left but legs--part of this blog's History of Women series.

There's nothing quite like objectifying women than objectifying them, making their objectification so wide and gross and visible that it is almost impossible to imagine that it was done--but, then, there it is.   And that's part of what we see as standard operating procedure here in these ads in Life magazine for a four week period in 1953,   I started out on this foray looking for an article about US aid to Vietnam, but kept bumping into these advertisements.  The images today have certainly changed and have become more subtle, but the message is still the same. 

The first series
 

  

is so odd; I'm not so sure why the dog was barking to muzzle the woman--she has hardly said anything...but perhaps that's the entire message.  There there's this approach:

keeping a beautiful, manicured and jeweled body while getting rid of the face and head and personality.

And then

Old Gold makes a final assault on womanhood, replacing her upper half with another oral fixation, keeping the booted lower half for whatever.  I think that there was a refrigerator with high heels in that year, somewhere, but I can't find it.

Center of Attention--the Map of Women's Visual Exploration of Man

JF Ptak Science Books Post 1136

This fantastic image comes via freakyfauna.tumblr.com and is related in some way to an earlier post here ( called "The Center of Levity.."¹), but not really.  (Image below is very clickable; an earlier much less detailed image appears on page 74 in this 1941 issue of Life magazine, centered around a woman's face and a toothbrush.) It is hardly a map of the macrocosmos incised with Pythagorean precision on the body of man², nor an astrological  or Kabalistic or Vitruvian perspective representation of humanity.  It is just a 1940's  eye-trail map of where women looked at a man, a non-mathematical treatment of vague interest.

It turns out that the seduction of a man's body to a woman's gaze--as difficult as that might seem from this photo--is fairly measurable, and was so even in the 1940's, when the researcher Herman F. Brandt (Drake University, Iowa) produced this image.  And what it is, basically, is a map of where women looked when their eyes were tracked as they looked at this man.  Brandt had a long career investigating ocular fixation, and (I think) developed a camera that would track the reflection of beams of light on the corneas of his subjects, recording eye movement in horizontal and vertical planes, as they drank in this fine figure of manhood.  In any event his research was of interest to a wide variety of people, from neurologists to fashion designers--I've got no idea of how that interest was manifested, or if it turned out to be valuable information.  I do know that the Brandt work utilized by Marshall Field & Co. did produce a remarkable photograph open to all sorts of interpretation.   Visual stimulus point #19 was left uninterpreted and unmentioned, though the great majority of visual hits was above the waist, and above the neck.

Notes:

1. One of the images from the Center of Levity post:

2. For example, this classic from Agrippa von Nettesheim, De Occulta Philosophia (1533):

Creating Bad-Hand Female Trouble, 1954--an Imaginary Reconstructed Filmstrip

JF Ptak Science Books

Retroist excursions like this into the land of social propriety from not so long ago is a bittersweet thing--its concerns can remind of of how far away from something we seem to be, when in reality that distance in time and space just isn't very far away at all; it is just slightly different,  renamed and repackaged.  For example, this advertisement from LIFE magazine for Trushay hand softener (1954) delivers pretty much the same message as most similar products today, except for the change in packaging and less obvious message.  The message may seem outdated but I think only in so far as the images and clumsiness of the delivery is concerned.  Products like this have increased by orders of magnitude, the target audiences age seems to have dropped considerably, and most of the time the pursuit of this 1954 end-result stays pretty much the  same. Exercises like this are peculiar, and can show us that the people who we are laughing at may very well be us. 

The reconstructed ad is below.